Revision as of 13:30, 14 November 2008

Solaris (and OpenSolaris) are Free Software operating systems released under the CDDL by Sun Microsystems. They are vaguely SysV-like. KDE4 runs on this operating system.

The KDE Project on the OpenSolaris site is intended to be the definitive source of information, but this page on TechBase is intended to collect information, porting and compilation guides, etc. Since TechBase is a wiki, this is much easier than going through the OpenSolaris editing process.

For an overview of the remaining issues, see the KDE4 on Solaris status page. It lists showstopper bugs and issues with dependencies. This page is concerned with instructions on how to build it all.

Scope

This page is about KDE4 (the KDE 4.1 branch; we are aiming for having KDE4.1 fully functional on Solaris) on Sun Solaris S10U5 or OpenSolaris Nevada 70b or OpenSolaris Nevada 83 running on both amd64 or SPARCv9 hardware and compiled with Sun Studio 12. No other KDE releases, operating system versions or hardware platforms are the target of this project, simply because the core contributors to the project do not have them or the time to work on them.

That's not to say it will not necessarily work; people have and continue to contribute work for obsolete hardware platforms (32-bit only like i386 and SPARCv8). You can probably run the binaries produced by the project on other OpenSolaris releases, even OpenSolaris 2008.5, but you're on your own.

On your own, that is, unless you register for Techbase and add your comments on what needed doing and what was problematic somewhere below.

The core team for KDE4 on Solaris is Adriaan de Groot, Lukas Oboril, Stefan Teleman. We'd like to thank Edward O'Callaghan, Ben Taylor and Mark Wright for their help in particular.

Standard Environment Setup

We don't have much in the way of documented KDE4 *use* on Solaris nor many reports of bugs found in daily use of the below KDE4 packages on http://bugs.kde.org/ .
Thus we welcome any contributions though either bug reports, the repo or by email.

Prerequisites

Warning

The Techbase documentation gets out of date quite quickly. Do not follow it blindly; step into the IRC channel or on to the mailing list for more details or help with issues.

Patching your System

You can use either Solaris 10 update 5 (S10U5) or Solaris Express (Nevada build 70b or 83 -- these two versions run on our build machine and on at least one developer's desktop). Other versions of the operating system might work, but there are no guarantees and probably not much sympathy either; OpenSolaris 2008.5 is downright broken as a development platform.

Studio 12
There is a command line install and a GUI. Having installed with both types,
I much prefer the GUI. It has finer grain control, and you can choose not to
patch immediately (select the Advanced Options tab when you get to the
install options, and unselect "Install Product Patches"). The reason to
not patch immediately, is that you're going to have patch Studio 12 after installing, and there's no sense carrying around an extra 400MB in saved patches because the Studio 12 distro already has some older patches included in the
distribution. Using [http://www.par.univie.ac.at/solaris/pca Patch Check
Advanced (PCA)] works well on both S10 and SXCE to handle patches for
Studio 12.

In /usr/include/python2.4/pyport.h , there's a gethostbyname prototype; it's wrong. comment it out for building.

The line reads as:

extern int gethostname(char *, int);

SNV_97+ - Special info

Warning

If you are using snv_97+, FOSSnas will fail unless you copy the following files into /usr/X11/lib/X11/config/ Note that this will be fixed in a later snv_rev and this page will be updated with a bit of hope.

Getting KDE4-SPEC's-Dev (Unstable Testing/Devolpment)

N.B. The above is also for contributing back (which this mail message is all about). The *-specs-dev repo is public and writable (over https).
So we welcome you too can push fixes back on to it; A review will happen before things end up in *-specs.

KBE Compilation and Installation of (Stable)

cd kde4-specs/ ; hg up ; cd specs/

more README

Read though and take note of anything important you may need to know since this was last updated.

/opt/dtbld/bin/env.sh

Note: This command will start a subshell. Be careful, because environment variables (notably PATH) set in your shell startup files will override those set up by this command.

make

This will now go off and build KDE4 and enything else needed as SysV packages. Come back in about 24h depending on your hardware.

Getting help

As usual, the IRC channel is a good place to start, but you must be able to pastebin compilation errors in order to get any help.
The IRC channel is never too busy.
#kde-solaris on irc.freenode.net . However, keep in mind that IRC is a live medium and it may not be the best place to ask questions. The mailing list kde-discuss at opensolaris.org is much more patient.

Also, you are expected to do your homework. Compiling KDE4 on Solaris is not for the faint of heart and you really need to know your way around compiling stuff and dealing with system software installation; otherwise you will be quickly ignored.